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Editor | Colin Wu
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On May 24th, Web3 game studio Metagame Industries announced that it had completed a strategic financing round with a valuation of nearly $100 million, with participating institutions including Sui development team Mysten Labs, game publisher Funplus/Xterio Ecosystem Fund, etc. Abyss World, a 3A-level game under Metagame Industries, also announced that it will hold related events on June 1st. In addition to the luxurious financing team endorsement, it also has 120,000 players who have joined the Steam wish list, and with the community’s question of “whether it can reverse the decline of the Sui ecosystem or the GameFi track”, the expectation for the game is high.
Abyss World is a third-person ARPG open world game, relying on the high-performance public chain Sui network, and later expanding into a multi-chain game parallel to Sui and Polygon. The game background is set in an imaginary world called “Nodinia” full of ancient secrets. Players can explore this vast world in the game and gradually decipher the “secrets of the abyss”.
Game basic concepts
1. Hero
The hero character in the game is a combination of profession, race, and characteristics.
(1) The profession includes five types: Warrior, Musha, Mages, Engineer, and Explorer. Different professions have different attributes, which can be divided into external attributes (physical strength, wisdom, magic power, and luck) and internal attributes. The parameters of external attributes determine the combat power and the minimum requirements for weapons and skills, and internal attributes refer to the character’s combat skills.
(2) The races are divided into five races: Bannerlord, Human, Orne, Seracoron, and Sigma Elves. Different races exhibit different combat characteristics in the game.
(3) Each hero has their own quirks/traits, both positive and negative, such as “Captain,” who can buff the team, and “Fight to the Death,” who is less likely to retreat even when severely injured.
2. Gameplay
The gameplay can be divided into two categories: the PvE mode, where players explore the in-game environment, and PvP in The Abyss Colosseum and The Battle Arena. The Abyss Colosseum is AI-driven combat that occurs after players are matched.
3. Assets
Unlike the typical two-token model, the homogenous assets that might produce value in Abyss World can be understood as “Token + Points + Stablecoin.” Early in the game’s development, there is only one native token, the fixed-supply AWT, that is not directly used for governance or equity tokens. The second is the in-game currency MGC, which only exists as a game point in the early stages and is not on the chain, meaning it has no speculative properties. The third is the stablecoin USDT/USDC, which is used to price and trade all in-game assets.
NFT assets can also be roughly divided into two types. The first are weapon or hero NFTs, which the official website refers to as “commodity NFTs” or “resource-generating NFTs.” The second type is non-weapon or hero NFTs, which the official website refers to as “asset-based NFTs.”
Game and Economic Systems
Depending on the different game modes, players can be broadly divided into two categories: casual players who primarily engage in PvE and competitive players who primarily engage in PvP. Casual players and competitive players achieve balance by economically exchanging with each other, rather than colliding within the same game. Casual players can earn the in-game currency MGC by completing daily PvE tasks, which have no speculative properties. They can then use MGC points and collect the necessary game items (NFT fragments) to forge weapon or hero NFTs. Casual players can sell these weapon or hero NFTs on the in-game trading market for profit. Competitive players, in order to achieve a good ranking on various PvP competition leaderboards, need to purchase better weapon or hero NFTs from the trading market to improve their lineup’s combat power and increase their chances of winning.
This kind of weapon/hero NFT created through casting can be called a resource-generating NFT. Casting these NFTs requires a specific NFT factory in the game (NFTfactory). Casting NFTs will require a 3-5% casting fee as the factory’s source of income. In the early stages, the management of the factory belongs to the game project side, so the casting fee of the factory is part of the game’s profit (the casting fee should be priced in MGC, which also provides a basis for the future MGC on-chain); in the future, the profit distribution of the factory will be extended to long-term partners and stakeholders of the game. The cast NFTs can be traded through the game’s built-in C2C NFT market, and players can freely trade these NFTs using USDT/USDC stablecoins. The transaction will generate a handling fee paid to the foundation and its partners, so the C2C NFT market handling fee is another place where the game generates profits.
Just as MGC is mainly responsible for weapon or hero NFTs and PVE rewards, AWT is mainly responsible for non-weapon or hero asset NFTs and core player incentives.
First of all, AWT serves as the raw material for asset NFTs. In the scenario given in the official documentation, it is explained as follows:
When players complete season tasks to get treasure boxes, they need to use keys to open them. For a period of time, the ownership of the key can only be generated by destroying AWT, and the key can be freely traded in the market; players holding the key will be able to get transaction handling fees for items in the treasure box.
The official promises to design multiple similar scenarios in the game, which can attract more participants who contribute value to the game without destroying the traditional player experience. Although the example given by the official does not explicitly state it, it can be inferred that the key and the items in the treasure box will both belong to asset NFTs, and the destroyed AWT is dynamic. The value of the key and the scarcity/functional value of the items in the treasure box complement each other. When the NFTs that can be opened in the treasure box are scarce enough or have strong functional effects in the game, the potential value of the key is higher. Since pricing and trading in the trading market are denominated in stablecoins, this also anchors a dynamic real value for AWT. The more powerful the items that can be opened, the higher the value of the key, and the more AWT will be destroyed.
Secondly, AWT will allocate 40% of the total amount as incentives for core players in the game ecosystem, including players who complete in-game tasks each week, PVP rewards, game guild operation rewards, proposal rewards, and third-party market liquidity rewards.
Governance System
The governance system of Abyss World is also noteworthy. It abandons the 1 Token 1 Vote governance model and does not allocate governance rights based on the amount of AWT held by users. It values players’ achievements in the game and obtains nominated governance seats based on multiple in-game indicators. This can avoid the dilemma of large holders who are not players and ensure that large holders do not have too much say in proposals. These in-game indicators may include players in the top ranks of the season PVP rankings, players who hold Gazer/Genesis NFTs, or players who hold key asset NFTs. In addition, after the issuance and circulation of AWT, Abyss World DAO will be formed.
From the video circulating on the Internet and the community participation in the internal test demo evaluation, Abyss World, which uses the Unreal 5 engine, has a high degree of completion, and its graphics are not inferior to some 3A masterpieces. Therefore, the game has relatively high requirements for computer configuration. In addition, the Abyss World team also attaches great importance to attracting Web2 player groups, and has cooperated with well-known game platforms such as EPIC and promoted it in many well-known game media such as IGN to show its determination.
Of course, strictly speaking, Abyss World still belongs to a Web2.5 game, that is, assets are on-chain, but the game is not on-chain. From the economic system of Abyss World, it can be seen that the team behind it has deep thinking on the dual-token model of blockchain games and has given its own “non-governance Token+game currency points+stablecoin pricing and trading+classified NFT” solution on this model. However, this is essentially a repair of the dual-token model, not a breakthrough. Of course, this is not a problem of a single game, but a dilemma faced by the entire blockchain game industry. The logic of Abyss World is what capital used to say before, that blockchain games should have graphics standards that are not inferior to traditional games, and put game quality and player experience first, and Tokenomics as a supplement.
In addition, although Abyss World initially tried to build around the Sui chain, in the subsequent plans, it may gradually build some genesis assets on Polygon because EVM chains have better liquidity and native stablecoins. Sui is then re-planned for game settlement, which may cause issues in the future regarding cross-chain security of EVM and non-EVM assets, as well as incompatibility of single wallets.
Reference:
https://medium.com/@ABYSS_WORLD/tokenomics-update-ido-de3a3915eb37
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